Bigscreen Beyond Teardown Overviews Design Decisions Behind Compact Headset

By
Ben Lang
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7

CEO Darshan Shankar sits down with the upcoming Bigscreen Beyond VR headset for a teardown and explanation of the company’s design decisions.

Bigscreen Beyond is a made-for-enthusiasts VR headsets coming from the makers of the social VR theater application Bigscreen. In our recent hands-on with the headset we found an impressively well-built device that’s taking a different approach than other PC VR headsets on the market.

Photo by Road to VR

Bigscreen Beyond is due to start shipping in Q3, and ahead of its release Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar has sat down to tear the tiny headset open and talk about the decisions the company made and why.

Bigscreen Beyond is impressive in many ways, but it’s priced for serious VR enthusiasts. The headset starts at $1,000, which doesn’t include controllers or tracking beacons (which would add another $580).

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • XRC

    Here in the UK the Vive Pro 2 full kit sells at £1399 (including tax and shipping) with the Vive Pro “wand” controllers.

    As comparison, for Bigscreen beyond:

    Bigscreen beyond £1149
    Valve Base station £139
    Valve Base station £139
    Valve Index controllers pair £259

    Total £1686 including tax and shipping

    Reasonable pricing considering headset and Index controllers

    • ViRGiN

      vive pro 1/2was never reasonable, it was more of the same for elitists.
      big screen actually does something new and real, and it seems like they are heading into the right direction.

      HOWEVER. it’s a pcvr headset. making the headset obsolete on it’s own since nobody cares about pcvr, a dead platform.

      yea yea, keep getting triggered people. years has passed and nothing has changed. are you enjoying your vertigo 2? hubris? lonn? awesome games huh? shame nobody gives a single fuck about those.
      gorilla tag, blade and sorcery and beat saber is the driving force behind PCVR. so why even use PC in the first place to access VR?

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Big screen isn’t doing anything new and real.
        And there are many interesting games on PCVR, but maybe they’re just not your prefered type of games.

        • ViRGiN

          No there aren’t. Looks like it’s nobody preferred type of games, unless you’re talking about your exclusive club of order gentleman yelling to a strapped box.

  • xyzs

    this thing would have been so much more interesting with integrated tracking and embedded controllers.

    I would never install base station in my house, and I would not pay 300 extra bucks for controllers anyway.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      These comments remind me of something I read about people with allergies moving to the desert. There are a number of desert communities founded especially to escape the yearly attack of pollen that makes some people’s lives miserable. Moving to the desert solves this, as conditions are so harsh that the few existing plants cannot effort to reproduce by spewing billions of sperm cells into the air, hoping that some find their target. Unfortunately a lot of those moving insisted on keeping up their lifestyle and started to plant flowers in their yards and water their lawns, obviously reintroducing the very problem they wanted to escape in the first place.

      We have been bothered with heavy, uncomfortable and misfitting headsets for a decade, with standalone HMDs making it a lot worse. So now someone (Bigscreen) decided to move to the technical desert, remove everything that is not absolutely essential, replaced any adjustment settings with an individually preconfigured facial interface, and it actually worked. The Bigscreen Beyond gets universal praise for how comfortable and unintrusive it is, allowing to be worn for many hours with the user barely noticing it.

      Of course everybody wants that, but it really needs integrated cameras for tracking. And an audio solution. And passthrough. And it has to be adjustable, so it can fit multiple users and be resold. And of course it must be cheap. And standalone. Everybody wants to keep their flower garden, blatantly ignoring that all that accumulated stuff was what caused most of the weight and usability problems in the first place. It would be nice to have everything, but at the current state of technology you have do decide between learning to love the desert or continuing to live with an aching nose and teary eyes.

  • da

    Asgard’s wrath, Star wars squadrons,Ms flight simulator, half life Alex etc all amazing PC games for vr. Oculus games are a joke.